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| Karen and me dressed as earth children for Halloween |
At the end of March, 1991, Karen and I welcomed our first baby into the
family, and composition activity slowed down considerably. We had very
cleverly announced the impending event to our mothers (and my dad) while we
were visiting with my folks toward the end of the previous Summer, by
mentioning that we had tickets to an opera in April and that we would be
needing a babysitter that evening. General astonishment and celebration
ensued. We let the news filter out to our choir while, during a rehearsal of
some crowd noise, Karen said "I will be over my pregnancy in [some number of]
months" rather than "salt light" or whatever else was written in the score.
As our activities with the choir, and with choral music in general, were
becoming a large part of our lives, I tried once again to see if I could write
effective music for choir. fourpartsongs (1992) is a setting of a hymn
by Charles Wesley that appeared, sans tune, in the 1989 United Methodist
Hymnal. I set each of the four stanzas separately (four part-songs) for SATB
(four-part songs). As compositions go they are solid and, I think, singable,
but difficult. They are diatonic, a few degrees skewed off of tonal practice,
and don't shy away from what I regard as tasteful tone-painting. Later, I
recast one of them - O Love, how cheering is thy ray - as a solo for Karen to
sing, and even later re-set the entire text, with new music, as a hymn.
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| wave for the camera |
1993 saw the first of what became many recitals that I gave at our church. The
main impetus was to present
A Cat's Life, with narration provided by
Ellen Dessler, a drama student at the University of Washington. The program
also included Elaine Barkin's
Brandeis, and Benjamin Boretz's
Partita,
Liebeslied, and
("...what I could hear, trying to crawl out from between the lines of your
last ferocious Sonata...").
That year I also composed a big concert piece, originally for organ:
"...finish then thy new creation...". The title is from another Charles
Wesley text. Looking back at it now I was struggling with how to feel my way
through a large-scale piece without any way to think clearly about where I was
going and what I was carrying along. It is not a bad practice as such, but the
result in this case is rather woolly. A few years later I arranged it for
string orchestra, and it was performed in that form by a community orchestra
on Vashon Island, under the baton of my former composition teacher Dell Wade.
More successful was Nocturnes or Discourses, a procedurally structured
improvisation project realized with the kind assistance of sound engineer Tom
Stiles. Tom had access to the big piano in Brechemin Auditorium at the UW, so,
late one evening we set it up with a microphone. Tom was recording digitally,
and this was my first experience working with that innovation. First I sat
silently for a span of time (5 minutes? 9 minutes? - something that divided 45
evenly so that the finished thing would fit on a 45' cassette side). Then Tom
would play that recording back to me through headphones while I improvised to
it, as though I were reading it as a score. Then we took that recording and
repeated the process until we had enough sessions to overlay the
recordings so that each improvisation would be paired with its "score". In
2006/2007 I was able, thanks to the acquisition of a multi-track digital
recording device to redo this on my own, using two separate pianos - or
perhaps on each piano separately - and then combining them.
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| your blogger and his boss |
Doomsome Otherings (a non-Latinate translation of "Canonic Variations")
is a set of five variations (inclusive of the 'theme') for viola and piano
prompted by a possible mis-construal of a movement from one of Prokofiev's
piano concerti. What I thought I had heard in that movement was the intrusion
of one variation's figurations into another variation's flow. I thought it
would make an interesting form if I were to do that systematically. I wrote a
'theme' of 50 measures that uses a homogenous figuration scheme for the first
30 bars, then switches to the figuration scheme of the variation two slots
later (music like variation two into the 'theme', of three into one,
four into two, 'theme' into three, and of one into four) for the next ten
bars, switching back to the music like that of the first 30 bars for the last
10. I also had a scheme for determining the pitch material of each bar that
ran, as I recall, somewhat independently of the figuration scheme. It involved
several layers of overlapping sequences of pentachords, but details of that
determination have faded from memory. I still like the piece, though the piano
part is beyond me and it seems to have a vanishing effect on violists, so I
stopped shopping it around lest I lose any more violist friends.
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| your blogger failing to home improve |
During this time Ben had asked me whether, based on my flimsy knowledge of
formal logic notation, I would help proof-read and prepare computer engraved
files of the formal definitions in "Meta-Variations: Studies in the
Foundations of Musical Thought", which he was preparing for publication by
OpenSpace. While re-reading it I started to wonder what tonal music, as
generated analogously to the "Outline of a Tonal-Syntactic System" contained
in Part V of Meta-Variations, would sound like if it were 'stretched' so that
all the generating intervals were made larger. I quickly settled on a 17-tone
"octave" (or "modular interval") as being an interesting choice for the
modular partitioning (an octave plus a perfect fourth rather than a perfect
octave) because that would make the second partitioning interval (analogous to
the 7 semitone "Fifth") an interval of 9 semitones (a major 6th), and the
third partitioning (analogous to the 3 and 4 semitone intervals of minor and
major thirds) intervals of 4 and 5 semitones respectively. I was also amused
that my root position "major" triad would be "C F A", punning on a tonal root
position "F A C", and that my "minor" triad would be "C E A", punning on the
tonal minor triad of "A C E". We love puns so there it was. My 1994 setting of
Psalm 130 ("Out of the depths...") was my first go at it and I was intrigued
by the results, using just the most basic of tonal functions: "tonic",
"dominant", and "subdominant" harmonies, and possibly a secondary dominant or
two. The expanded octave and variability of sounding pitches across the
registers opened up a world for me in which I could compose unique harmonic
paths using fairly simple pitch functions. I have been following up on
ramifications of this speculation ever since and consequently my subsequent
oeuvres is peppered liberally with "mod-17" pieces of one kind or another.
Banned Rehearsal continued doing regular sessions, mostly just Karen, Aaron
and me, later joined by our toddler, but toward the end of 1994 Neal and Anna
were back in town with their little one so things began to get busy
indeed. We had been holding our sessions in the spare bedroom, but soon our toddler would need that room. There happened to be a two-car garage on the lot, but the configuration made it nigh impossible to get a second car into it, so with the assistance of my dad we framed half of it in for a studio. The Tintinabulary has been collecting instruments ever since.
Banned Playout (1991):
Numbered: (243-279) 29:03:17
Total
1991:29:03:17
Banned Playout (1992)
Numbered: (280-315) 28:14:01
Total 1992:
28:14:01
Banned Playout (1993)
Numbered: (316-347) 26:02:49
Total 1993:
26:02:49
Banned Playout (1994)
Numbered: (348-379) 24:54:42
Sectionals: 2
Sessions: 1:32:42
Total 1994: 26:27:24
Grand Total: 480:47:31
Scores:
Doomsome Otherings
Psalm 130
Recordings:
Psalm 130 (1994)
Nocturnes or Discourses (1993)
